Think about the power to weight ratio--with as little as a plastic vehicle with a passenger or two would weigh on Ceres, the ratio would be very high, especially after they found the ferromagnetics in the belt that could be magnetized a hundred times as strong as today's (that story, "The Pirate", is still in edit), replace the magnets in a 100 watt motor with them, and one watt will run that motor as well as 100 did the old.

They already had real moon buggies, they're still up there. They used wheels, but the moon is a LOT heavier than Ceres.

Imagine playing basketball on Ceres? I might add that to a story, there were microgravity sports in "Mars, Ho!".

I don't back up daily, more like weekly, plus whenever I have a rash of new data. I keep the backup drive unplugged except when backing up, and never in s thunderstorm. Losing my non-backed up data would only hurt a little, it isn't like I'll lose a 10,000 customer database or anything.

Before I retired, backups were automatically done daily by software. I had to change the backup tapes weekly.

Those were all bad presidents. My grandmother, born in 1903, said Coolidge caused the depression but Hoover was a terrible president, too. Most historians consider Lincoln's predecessor, James Buchanan,.was history's worse.

I never thought I'd ever see a worse president than Carter, but GW proved me wrong.

You can always kill the phone's sound before bed, and check messages when you get up. You kids just don't understand that answering your phone, whether talk, text, email, amber alert, or presidential alert is NOT MANDATORY. If you're driving, leave the damned thing in your pocket, whoever is attempting contact can wait until you get where you're going.

Stop being a slave to your phone!

If it looks like there may be tornadoes that night, you might want to let the presidential/amber alerts annoy you.

Previewing this, I laughed; this font makes "tornadoes" look like "tomadoes" (I've seen "tomatoes" misspelled like that before).

Do you work for Maxtor or something? I've had hard drives for decades, few have failed and the failures weren't brand specific, and all were old when they died.

Did you have it sitting next to a heater vent or something? Solid state electronics hate heat. I've had a 3TB Seagate for a couple of years now.

I do avoid Sony like the plague, because if you buy digital electronics from someone who deliberately vandalized your PC with malware that came on a Sony-BMG music CD your daughter bought in a record store, you're a fucking moron.

With hovercraft there are no tires needed and air pressure would still work, but it dawned on ma that a hovercraft wouldn't work in the near vacuum after the dome's leak. So I changed the story in the manuscript yesterday. He gets in his fan-powered car and it won't move, so he has to walk to the hospital.

Uh, no. It's not a standards mark but an indicator of origin. I may think Foo brand shoes suck, but if I want genuine Foo for whatever reason, I want to know I'm buying genuine Foo. Maybe their quality sucks but they're made in a well-respected factory in Colorado, they treat their employees well, and they only emit pure oxygen and distilled water from their factories. The Chinese knockoffs might be better, but I want the Colorado-made product. The whole point of trademarks is that only Foo can claim to make Foo shoes.

Customers can get an Apple TV included with 3 months pre-paid of any DIRECTV NOW package.

The base 32GB Apple TV is currently $149. Looking at it another way, AT&T will sell you an Apple TV at a $44 discount and throw in three free months of live TV programming. That's actually a sweet deal.

PS: This is the first and probably only time you'll hear me describe anything from AT&T as being a decent value.

PPS: In before "apple tv sucks fanboyz lol etc". I have an Apple TV and I like it. You may prefer something else. Yay, here's your cookie. But if you were thinking about buying an Apple TV for Christmas, here's a $44 coupon off.

That's great news! Trademarks are the one part of IP I can happily support. If I want to buy Foo brand shoes, and I see a shoebox marked with Foo's logo, I want to be reasonably sure that it actually contains Foo-approved shoes. Sure, people try to abuse trademarks ("you're not allowed to use our name in a news article criticizing us!" and other jackassery), but the actual concept of trademarks is great. This is the kind of IP law enforcement I actually want to see.